>”human capital was strongly transmitted from parents to children”
That doesn’t sound distasteful to me at all. Is that bad?
Can we make a distinction between parents raising their kids and giving them great opportunities, and “nepotism” where people are put in no-show jobs or are wholly incompetent?
It seems like the system of “nepotism” the paper describes is not bad at all, but instead is working well since the paper observes that when passing occupation from father to son would be inefficient/lead to bad social outcomes, it happens far less
I think it's fine in a true "family business" e.g. you wholly own a hardware store or a restaurant and you have your family working there and eventually you hand it off to your children (assuming they want it).
In large public companies or institutions that have shareholders or state owners then it's unfair for an executive or senior administrator to carve out a job for a family member. He's giving them something he doesn't own, unlike in the family business example.
Honestly, I think "nepotism" and "occupational persistence" are more about how we feel or judge the phenomenon, and what are prior expectations are.
If sons and nephews are bad managers and a business suffers... that's nepotism. If they're good managers and the business succeeds, that's a family business. if the local authorities hire family... that's nepotism, because we have an expectation that it should be done differently.
A lot of words are like this. Positive and negative words with positive or negative associations that we use to describe the same thing... depending on the association we want to emphasize.
But once homo retcom has words... we think in those words. So, we think of nepotism (for example) as this distinct thing, and expect this nuanced definition to account for the negative or positive aspects.
This paper is basically a formalization of that process.
We currently live in a society that valorizes meritocracy and equal opportunity and also providing for one's descendants. It supposes that you're you should have equal opportunity to enjoy a middle class or greater lifestyle if you're not a total mess, and that your success is something you can provide to your children as a leg up.
Not every society struggles/struggled so poignantly with the contradiction between those things as we now do, but we do, and that's where the modern criticism of nepotism originates.
Teaching your children your trade by inviting them into your workshop or boardroom is sensible, but it inevitably means that there's less room in that workshop or boardroom for the scrappy, bright outsider whose supposed to have a fair chance.
There's not really one right answer under that kind of tension, so there's no surprise when criticism is levied in either direction.
Well... the "right answer" is going to be subjective. But I think parents providing for their children is going to win out 1000 times out of 1000. It's got human psychology and biology behind it.
If doing what is "right" means I have to hamstring my kid's chances, then I'm going to pass on "right" (or, more likely, re-orient my thinking to make it not "right") and help my kid.
It's pretty easy to give your kid loads of advantages without engaging in nepotism. The definition of nepotism is actually very narrow!
You can teach them your trade. You can show them that education is important, modelling and rewarding behaviours like reading. You can make sure you've got time to be there for them. You can introduce them to your friends in other lines of work. You can check their homework and help them when they struggle, within reason. You can make sure they never need a part-time job to get by while in school. You can get them tutors whenever they're having trouble. You can get them extra tuition outside school. You can pay for them to go to a great college. You can cover their living expenses when they're working an unpaid internship. You can invest in their startup. You can assure you that even if their startup crashes and burns, you'll make sure they always have a roof over their head and food in their belly. You can buy them a house, pay their bills, gift them millions of dollars.
And you can hire them to work for you - as long as you make a point to clearly not favour them in the workplace, by insisting they work hard every day, don't use your name, and that they start at the bottom and work their way up on their own merits.
And you can overlap these things! In your role as CEO give them an unpaid internship in the mailroom of your company, and in your role as a parent give them a $10,000/month allowance? Technically not nepotism.
The only things you can't do is give them undeserved promotions, or hire them directly into a senior job.
And it doesn't need to be the mail room (though that's not a bad thing to have exposure to, perhaps, but circumstances will determine what's appropriate). The most important thing is not to put them in a position that harms[0] the company and that they're not (at least not yet) qualified for. This is not only bad for the company, but for the child, as they are not put a position that allows them to grow, but one in which they can't help but fail in. So it's a failure of parenting.
[0] "Harm" doesn't need to be catastrophic. Misuse of company funds is a kind of theft, and paying someone a salary who is basically on perpetual holiday is unjust, for example.
You seem to be claiming that nepotism is good and that it is prevalent in all societies. Surely I misunderstood?
Most societies do demand that workers for important roles be selected on merit or based on other criteria known to all participants, and not based on some individual's wish to care for their family or friends.
This is without anyone thinking of such a wish as illegitimate. However , acting on it is still nepotism and societies impose this prohibition on its members because it benefits all. In this sense, "parents providing for their children" is "losing out" in certain important domains all around the world.
> Most societies do demand that workers for important roles be selected on merit or based on other criteria known to all participants
Most societies become pretty practical after a while, and strive for people to be reliable and adequate for the roles they're appointed to play and celebrate the occasional master of some craft or pursuit. Being groomed for an opportunity from childhood, under the attention of one's family, often delivers on those and so a lot of societies don't worry about it except when it's obvious that somebody completely incompetent has ended up responsible for some influential or essential role.
It's actually a very peculiar modern experiment to expect every role to somehow be filled by the most capable person and for every person to be appointed a role that they're personally passionate about. Maybe it'll give us some amazing Star Trek utopia someday, but you don't see that idea expressed very much in history and so we don't really have reason to know what will happen if we try to make it so.
Nah, we can't. We can't redefine words to make us feel better.
According to Cambridge Dictionary, nepotism is "the act of using your power or influence to get good jobs or unfair advantages for members of your own family." As soon as you favored your kid, it's nepotism, and it's bad. It undermines meritocracy and contributes to an unjust society. It's pretty straightforward to understand.
No, we can't, because it rarely ever works out that way.
I've yet to work at a family owned company where the children were anywhere near as competent as their parents, and I've worked at multigenerational companies, so imagine that.
The one I spent the most time with was a publisher whose founders were Tulane educated intellectuals who walked the walk and talked the talk. The next generation sounded like they fell off an alligator tour air boat with the intellect to match. Their children are the dumbest group of human beings I've ever seen graduate from high school. Utterly and completely useless for anything other than getting hammered on the weekends and keeping random desk chairs from rolling away. Yet they were guaranteed jobs, even as the company's numbers continued to dwindle and they continued to use far more resources than they contributed. No Christmas bonus? That's because they needed to pay these morons enough to live in the same neighborhood as their father, meaning that they needed to make about 80% more than anyone else in their roles.
Ownership is not leadership. Leadership takes a set of skills that many people don't possess, and it's less common with the children of the well-off.
That is likely to be true if we take a limited firm-centric view (the local shop will never be the best it can be). But having a multigenerational shop and shopkeeper may be better for the larger community. Not saying it is, but in some cases it probably is. Certainly could be
Teaching your skills and strengths to your kid and eventually giving them or helping them (within the bounds of what's acceptable and ethical) get a job they're qualified for is good. This is basically how every mutli generational family business works.
Giving an unqualified kid a no-show job or a real job they f-up is nepotism and bad.
> Teaching your skills and strengths to your kid and eventually giving them or helping them [...] get a job they're qualified for is good.
Indeed. If some people are claiming that somehow giving your own child, uh, what shall I say, priority (?) and your full attention, teaching them skills and transmitting wisdom, and getting them opportunities is somehow bad, then sorry, but that's shockingly stupid, evil, and misanthropic. Doing these things basically describes what is more or less a core duty of parenthood. A parent has the obligation to prioritize his own children. The idea that such generational advantage is nepotism screams of envy. Inequality of opportunity is not unfair or wrong. Indeed, one of the purposes of meritocracy is to become better off so that you can give your own kids a better start than you had. It's wonderful to be able to give your kids opportunities that you have access to.
I think people are failing to distinguish two things, namely, prioritizing your own kin on the one hand, and on the other, prioritizing kinship favors at the gross expense of the common good. (At least that's the most charitable interpretation. The less charitable one is that the have-nots are just envious and feel entitled. There is no point in discussing anything with such twisted people.)
If a baker wants to hire his son, that's perfectly fine and completely his business. He doesn't have to open up the pool to check off some ridiculous meritocracy checkbox. It's his bakery. Of course, if he puts his son in a position of authority that he is grossly unsuited for, well, then he imperils his own business. Oh, well.
In a larger organization that's private, there is nothing wrong with hiring your own kid, either. Putting him in a position that he is completely unsuited for threatens the company, of course, and in that sense is simply stupid. It can also be argued that the company is harming the common good of the company. Private ownership doesn't mean you don't have certain moral obligations toward your employees. Good leadership is one such obligation, and putting an incompetent child in a position that harms the company is a failure of leadership.
> Can we make a distinction between parents raising their kids and giving them great opportunities, and “nepotism” where people are put in no-show jobs or are wholly incompetent?
That difference is only on paper, purely academical. In reality, almost all the time, this quickly morphs into pushing your kin into positions of power where they make a mess but you still tolerate them because supposedly they are at least somewhat predictable and you don't want to invest the time and effort to build trust with a stranger.
(Or whatever their actual motivation is -- to me it remains mostly a mystery.)
> We find evidence of nepotism for 5–6.6% of scholars’ sons in Protestant and for 29.4% in Catholic universities and academies. Catholic institutions relied more heavily on intra-family human capital transfers. We show that these differences partly explain the divergent path of Catholic and Protestant universities after the Reformation.
"Protestants also tried to impose their own bigotry but lacked sufficient coordination and authority. Had they been more effective, modern science and sustained economic growth might have never taken off."
That's an interesting take. It seems to have a continental Europe perspective. In the first 150 years of the American colonies, Catholicism was illegal, except for Pennsylvania. However, even there, Catholics remained disenfranchised. The first Catholic university in the US, Georgetown, opened in 1789. (Harvard: 1636, Yale: 1701). The first amendment was ratified in 1791 (meaning Catholicism could no longer be made illegal). Catholics were mostly unwelcome to attend other schools, that was the reason for divergence and almost certainly assured a high nepotism rate. Also note that in the 1700's/1800's nepotism in government was considered normal.
Agree. Hollywood and Wallstreet are great examples. Also the founders of Google and Facebook. It's no coincidence. Though I'm not sure this is nepotism as much as it is organized clan behavior.
I think Indians are even more so but there it's about caste and not just being Indian.
I can't speak for all South Asian Americans, but in my experience caste is not a significant player in our community in the US at least.
Alternatives like University Affiliation, Regional ties, Ethnic ties, Clan ties, and Workplace affiliation play a greater role due to the nature of South Asian immigration in the US (tends to be white collar professionals across all ethnic groups).
Treating South Asian Americans homogeneously will lead to the same mistakes like treating all Latinos homogeneously - plenty of South Asian heavy battleground counties like Loudoun County, Middlesex County, Williamson County, Kern County, San Joaquin County, etc have seen Ds margins drop significantly in the current election.
That said, we are a clannish bunch, and biradari (and every other South Asian language's equivalent of that word) is our guanxi.
Jewish communities are more tightly knit, and the families in these communities more interwoven with one another than the average Protestant would be to their own.
My intuition would be that nepotism would be more rife with this kind of community makeup, if you know your distant family and your family friends very well they're much more likely to try to help you out.
Judaism is nothing like protestantism or even catholicism. If it were, we wouldn't have protestantism or catholicism. Judaism ( by that I mean real judaism ) is racial/ethnic and centered around bloodlines while protestantism is universal.
> promotes education and reading for all.
No. Judaism promotes the study of torah/tanakh and even that is only within their own people. Judaism most certainly does not promote education in the general sense and not to the general public. That modern jews in the west pursue education is not due to judaism but to european culture.
> Plus Judaism promotes some form of debate.
In a superficial manner. Like how protestants and catholics debate. Certainly not in the socratic way of the greeks.
Judaism didn't go around the world spreading literacy like Catholicism and especially Protestantism did. After all the jewish god is only for the jews while the christian god is for all humanity.
"examined the contribution of inherited human capital versus nepotism to occupational persistence."
Quite an interesting article. I sort of agree with its conclusions, but I don't think the methodology actually works. They are measuring something, but that thing isn't an isolated measure of nepotism.
I suspect it's mire a measure of inflow, of new blood.
Those phenomenon are not distinct. There is no hard line between occupational persistence, nepotism and human capital inheritance.
In particular (from a very quick glance!) it looks like they distinguish between nepotism and inherited human capital only by using a particular model. They have data on father-son pairs and the correlation between them in terms of publication record; and data on total number of publications of (a) academics' sons and (b) outsiders. They impose a model with just nepotism and inherited human capital and fit it to the data. I'd worry there might be other explanations for the observed patterns.
It's individualism vs collectivism (if I got my terms right), with one side being "got mine, fuck you", whereas the other says that we're better together.
Take wealth distribution, on the one side we have the super and hyper-rich who live like kings, on the other we have the working poor who are one paycheck or bill away from bankruptcy and/or homelessness. Kings and serfs.
There were different kinds of kings though - before a certain point in the history of most countries kings had to actively fight and wage war to achieve and maintain their positions. Over time this became more of a position where the king would deserve their positions simply by having ancestors who were "stupendous badasses" but otherwise actually had to do very little.
Early medieval kings - like those of the Franks, the Visigoths or the Nordic people - were more often than not elected for life.
Arguably the distinction between royalty, nobility and commonfolk grew larger the longer the feudal system was in place, to the point where kings inherited entire countries by birthright at the end of the XVIII century.
In practice, even later English kings were effectively elected and could have their terms ended early. Taking a few Plantagenet examples, the nobles imprisoned Edward II as retaliation for the plots of Hugh Despenser, and then the king died mysteriously (adverb used ironically). Edward III was far more popular with the nobles due to his many victories in Scotland and France. His successor, Richard II, tried to make a lasting peace with France, but that was much less popular with the most powerful burghers and nobles. So Richard II was deposed, imprisoned, and died mysteriously. No doubt if they had security cameras in those days, they would have mysteriously ceased functioning at some critical moment. So ended the Plantagenets and began the line of Lancastrian kings.
I would push back slightly and say that this trend is more even and there is less disruption to it than sometimes historians try to present. E.g. the execution of Charles I during the English Civil War of the 17th century is often presented as a sharp break with tradition, but if one accepts that dissatisfactory kings usually wind up murdered via artful legalism combined with some negligent-jailor theater, it just looks like business as usual.
It probably didn't help Edward II that he had Robert the Bruce in Scotland to fight who was most certainly an actual stupendous badass but even he was employed on condition that:
"if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us as our King"
The risk of being overthrown was always there. They had to maintain their power through some combination of force, propaganda, and actual good rulership.
Politics is tricky because non wealthy very much support the wealthy politically. Agree or disagree it’s just reality in modern politics.
As for why we shouldn’t actually care abstractly there simply aren’t that many ultra wealthy. Any subsidies given to them just cost an incredible amount relative to the number of people helped etc. They also don’t directly matter in terms of broad metrics like human health, lifespan, happiness etc.
You brought up politics in relation to different economic class.
My point was how we treat ultra wealthy as a political issue is independent from the underlying reality. They aren’t directly outvoting poor people to revive more benefits, it’s instead a question of influence.
Billionaires tend to see positive ROI from getting involved in politics, which is self reinforcing over time. But, stepping back you can judge such systems not in terms of current politics parties operate, but in the broader context of how efficient systems are. In that context the ROI is negative for society even if it can be positive for some individuals that comes at significant cost.
It does when the side described was the edges of a distribution.
> wealth distribution, on the one side we have the super and hyper-rich
Replace a few words and:
> height distribution, on the one side we have the tall and hyper-tall
PS: To be clear the political interests of a group exist even if the group doesn’t map to a specified political party or ideology. Groups have specific interests independent of which other stances they take. We don’t think of short people in political terms, but there would be a real outrage if gas stations put their credit card readers 7 feet off the ground.
HN users can write anything they want, but that doesn’t automatically imply what they wrote is credible or must be assumed to be true for all subsequent replies…
Hence why I wrote ‘side’ in quotation marks, because I didn’t fully agree with the original parent comment’s characterization.
e.g. HN user 1 can say X part of the population is on the ‘side’ of the moon being made of blue cheese and Y part is on the ‘side’ of the moon being made of cheddar cheese. But future replies by HN user 2 and user 3 are free to treat that as all meaningless gibberish.
To me, nepotism is a classic principal-agent problem.
Imagine you own a business, but you hire me to manage it.
If I negotiate a great salary and use it to get my kids the best education, help them get a house, fund them through unpaid internships? Not nepotism.
If you, the owner, say you want your dumb kid paid six figures for a do-nothing job? Eh, it's your money.
But if I want my dumb kid paid six figures of your money? So I decide we need a senior executive social media manager to look after our twitter account, or something? Probably you're not going to like me ripping you off.
Yes, plus sometimes the "owner" is a group of people. Then it gets more difficult for them to coordinate against the agent.
If you take six figures out of my money, I have a strong incentive to find out. If you take six figures from a treasure chest that belongs to million people, most of them will decide it is not worth their time to investigate.
>nepotism is a natural mammalian instinct, it propels us to take care of our children
Plenty of primates and human groups have shared child rearing in a non-familial way. Tribes were not aligned exclusively on family lines, and "it takes a village" was a literal statement.
Humans have an instinct to take care of babies, not just our own progeny. Our pets literally evolved to take advantage of that. A cat is not at all your genetic family member, and yet will still trigger child rearing instincts in tons of people.
This idea that we are only programmed to take care of direct genetic relatives is incorrect and a societal choice, not a scientific one.
Nepotism is mostly a scaling problem. If you have a decent family and aren't an idiot about it - then for smaller stakes, and over shorter time-spans, nepotism usually works extremely well. And there is precious little damage to society, if Chuck hires his son Sam to drive one of his Chilly Chuck's Ice Cream Trucks for the summer.
But scale up enough, and nepotism looks both idiotic and evil. The "overhead" of finding, vetting, and orienting new talent - not meaningfully related to you - is relatively fixed. Vs. the chance that Albert Einstein's son is also a Nobel-level physicist is pretty damn low.
[Added] The top end of the nepotism disaster scale, of course, is having hereditary government leadership. So when "noble blood" yet again proves itself piss-poor, the go-to ways to replace the ruler are often murder, mayhem, and/or war.
> the gap in science that emerged during the Counter-Reformation was enormous, lasted centuries
Was it now? I'd say France in the 1800s did a pretty good job about all the science stuff, and until Germany took the lead towards the end of that century (I'd say ~1880s) they were way above everyone else when it came to scientific discovery, way above the Brits, that's for sure.
If by "Catholic" the authors of the study basically mean Italy and Spain (which would be a very reductionist take, but suppose that they do that) then the decline in scientific thought starting with the 1600s has lots of other potential (mostly economics- and demographics-based) causes, not religion itself. Reminder that Giordano Bruno, who came from a Catholic country, had no opening at the very protestant Oxford, to quote wikipedia [1]:
> He also lectured at Oxford, and unsuccessfully sought a teaching position there. His views were controversial, notably with John Underhill, Rector of Lincoln College and subsequently bishop of Oxford, and George Abbot, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury. Abbot mocked Bruno for supporting "the opinion of Copernicus that the earth did go round, and the heavens did stand still; whereas in truth it was his own head which rather did run round, and his brains did not stand still",[33] and found Bruno had both plagiarized and misrepresented Ficino's work, leading Bruno to return to the continent.
Ah, I had also forgotten that Copernicus himself had been a Catholic canon.
So all this study is just, to put it plainly, absolute bs.
Later edit: And talking about Catholic Spain, some of the most respected economists in the history of the dismal science were actually Catholic Scholastics, Schumpeter himself had almost only words of praise for the School of Salamanca guys that had written about economics, and in many cases he (Schumpeter) was trying to explain how the Spanish Scholastics had actually been ahead of their times in many domains of economics.
Germany anyway is a special case, because at this time it was quite heterodox. And even in protestant countries like Prussia, you could have a positive effect from Catholic countries surrounding like Poland. Also the quoted articles don't really support the position.
In the age of unlimited free flow of information, it is quite ridiculous that academic institutions still exist - unless their purpose is something else than studies. Education as privilege laundering has pretty much played out its part, since degrees are much more accessible to the lower born classes who were never supposed to have access to the same easy and well paying careers as the rich.
Try setting an toddler in front of an iPad and see how well the toddler learns how to read academic papers and the limitations of unlimited free flow of information would become quite evident.* While there have always been autodidacts, education is still a needed role to delegate for most, especially those who aren't privileged to have parents who already possess both an education and the time to personally propagate it.
You're trying your darnedest to not understand what I'm saying. Maybe you learned that in academia?
You can instantly distribute any academic books and papers online and you can live broadcast lectures, even have two way communication between lecturer and student in text, voice or video, no matter where they are on the globe.
So the idea is outdated that you should have to invest this amount of money or these many years of your youth and be in a specific place for a degree. It has been mostly an excuse for the rich to hire the children of other rich people for well paying jobs. "Oh, you don't have a degree. Sorry, we can't consider you". Now that everybody is getting degrees, that excuse doesn't work anymore.
>”human capital was strongly transmitted from parents to children”
That doesn’t sound distasteful to me at all. Is that bad?
Can we make a distinction between parents raising their kids and giving them great opportunities, and “nepotism” where people are put in no-show jobs or are wholly incompetent?
It seems like the system of “nepotism” the paper describes is not bad at all, but instead is working well since the paper observes that when passing occupation from father to son would be inefficient/lead to bad social outcomes, it happens far less
I think it's fine in a true "family business" e.g. you wholly own a hardware store or a restaurant and you have your family working there and eventually you hand it off to your children (assuming they want it).
In large public companies or institutions that have shareholders or state owners then it's unfair for an executive or senior administrator to carve out a job for a family member. He's giving them something he doesn't own, unlike in the family business example.
What fraction of ownership would make it okay?
100% ? 50% ? Something in the middle?
Honestly, I think "nepotism" and "occupational persistence" are more about how we feel or judge the phenomenon, and what are prior expectations are.
If sons and nephews are bad managers and a business suffers... that's nepotism. If they're good managers and the business succeeds, that's a family business. if the local authorities hire family... that's nepotism, because we have an expectation that it should be done differently.
A lot of words are like this. Positive and negative words with positive or negative associations that we use to describe the same thing... depending on the association we want to emphasize.
But once homo retcom has words... we think in those words. So, we think of nepotism (for example) as this distinct thing, and expect this nuanced definition to account for the negative or positive aspects.
This paper is basically a formalization of that process.
We currently live in a society that valorizes meritocracy and equal opportunity and also providing for one's descendants. It supposes that you're you should have equal opportunity to enjoy a middle class or greater lifestyle if you're not a total mess, and that your success is something you can provide to your children as a leg up.
Not every society struggles/struggled so poignantly with the contradiction between those things as we now do, but we do, and that's where the modern criticism of nepotism originates.
Teaching your children your trade by inviting them into your workshop or boardroom is sensible, but it inevitably means that there's less room in that workshop or boardroom for the scrappy, bright outsider whose supposed to have a fair chance.
There's not really one right answer under that kind of tension, so there's no surprise when criticism is levied in either direction.
Well... the "right answer" is going to be subjective. But I think parents providing for their children is going to win out 1000 times out of 1000. It's got human psychology and biology behind it.
If doing what is "right" means I have to hamstring my kid's chances, then I'm going to pass on "right" (or, more likely, re-orient my thinking to make it not "right") and help my kid.
It's pretty easy to give your kid loads of advantages without engaging in nepotism. The definition of nepotism is actually very narrow!
You can teach them your trade. You can show them that education is important, modelling and rewarding behaviours like reading. You can make sure you've got time to be there for them. You can introduce them to your friends in other lines of work. You can check their homework and help them when they struggle, within reason. You can make sure they never need a part-time job to get by while in school. You can get them tutors whenever they're having trouble. You can get them extra tuition outside school. You can pay for them to go to a great college. You can cover their living expenses when they're working an unpaid internship. You can invest in their startup. You can assure you that even if their startup crashes and burns, you'll make sure they always have a roof over their head and food in their belly. You can buy them a house, pay their bills, gift them millions of dollars.
And you can hire them to work for you - as long as you make a point to clearly not favour them in the workplace, by insisting they work hard every day, don't use your name, and that they start at the bottom and work their way up on their own merits.
And you can overlap these things! In your role as CEO give them an unpaid internship in the mailroom of your company, and in your role as a parent give them a $10,000/month allowance? Technically not nepotism.
The only things you can't do is give them undeserved promotions, or hire them directly into a senior job.
And it doesn't need to be the mail room (though that's not a bad thing to have exposure to, perhaps, but circumstances will determine what's appropriate). The most important thing is not to put them in a position that harms[0] the company and that they're not (at least not yet) qualified for. This is not only bad for the company, but for the child, as they are not put a position that allows them to grow, but one in which they can't help but fail in. So it's a failure of parenting.
[0] "Harm" doesn't need to be catastrophic. Misuse of company funds is a kind of theft, and paying someone a salary who is basically on perpetual holiday is unjust, for example.
You seem to be claiming that nepotism is good and that it is prevalent in all societies. Surely I misunderstood?
Most societies do demand that workers for important roles be selected on merit or based on other criteria known to all participants, and not based on some individual's wish to care for their family or friends.
This is without anyone thinking of such a wish as illegitimate. However , acting on it is still nepotism and societies impose this prohibition on its members because it benefits all. In this sense, "parents providing for their children" is "losing out" in certain important domains all around the world.
> Most societies do demand that workers for important roles be selected on merit or based on other criteria known to all participants
Most societies become pretty practical after a while, and strive for people to be reliable and adequate for the roles they're appointed to play and celebrate the occasional master of some craft or pursuit. Being groomed for an opportunity from childhood, under the attention of one's family, often delivers on those and so a lot of societies don't worry about it except when it's obvious that somebody completely incompetent has ended up responsible for some influential or essential role.
It's actually a very peculiar modern experiment to expect every role to somehow be filled by the most capable person and for every person to be appointed a role that they're personally passionate about. Maybe it'll give us some amazing Star Trek utopia someday, but you don't see that idea expressed very much in history and so we don't really have reason to know what will happen if we try to make it so.
Nah, we can't. We can't redefine words to make us feel better.
According to Cambridge Dictionary, nepotism is "the act of using your power or influence to get good jobs or unfair advantages for members of your own family." As soon as you favored your kid, it's nepotism, and it's bad. It undermines meritocracy and contributes to an unjust society. It's pretty straightforward to understand.
No, we can't, because it rarely ever works out that way.
I've yet to work at a family owned company where the children were anywhere near as competent as their parents, and I've worked at multigenerational companies, so imagine that.
The one I spent the most time with was a publisher whose founders were Tulane educated intellectuals who walked the walk and talked the talk. The next generation sounded like they fell off an alligator tour air boat with the intellect to match. Their children are the dumbest group of human beings I've ever seen graduate from high school. Utterly and completely useless for anything other than getting hammered on the weekends and keeping random desk chairs from rolling away. Yet they were guaranteed jobs, even as the company's numbers continued to dwindle and they continued to use far more resources than they contributed. No Christmas bonus? That's because they needed to pay these morons enough to live in the same neighborhood as their father, meaning that they needed to make about 80% more than anyone else in their roles.
Ownership is not leadership. Leadership takes a set of skills that many people don't possess, and it's less common with the children of the well-off.
That is likely to be true if we take a limited firm-centric view (the local shop will never be the best it can be). But having a multigenerational shop and shopkeeper may be better for the larger community. Not saying it is, but in some cases it probably is. Certainly could be
The article is not about toddlers. It is about adult children.
You're missing the point.
Teaching your skills and strengths to your kid and eventually giving them or helping them (within the bounds of what's acceptable and ethical) get a job they're qualified for is good. This is basically how every mutli generational family business works.
Giving an unqualified kid a no-show job or a real job they f-up is nepotism and bad.
> Teaching your skills and strengths to your kid and eventually giving them or helping them [...] get a job they're qualified for is good.
Indeed. If some people are claiming that somehow giving your own child, uh, what shall I say, priority (?) and your full attention, teaching them skills and transmitting wisdom, and getting them opportunities is somehow bad, then sorry, but that's shockingly stupid, evil, and misanthropic. Doing these things basically describes what is more or less a core duty of parenthood. A parent has the obligation to prioritize his own children. The idea that such generational advantage is nepotism screams of envy. Inequality of opportunity is not unfair or wrong. Indeed, one of the purposes of meritocracy is to become better off so that you can give your own kids a better start than you had. It's wonderful to be able to give your kids opportunities that you have access to.
I think people are failing to distinguish two things, namely, prioritizing your own kin on the one hand, and on the other, prioritizing kinship favors at the gross expense of the common good. (At least that's the most charitable interpretation. The less charitable one is that the have-nots are just envious and feel entitled. There is no point in discussing anything with such twisted people.)
If a baker wants to hire his son, that's perfectly fine and completely his business. He doesn't have to open up the pool to check off some ridiculous meritocracy checkbox. It's his bakery. Of course, if he puts his son in a position of authority that he is grossly unsuited for, well, then he imperils his own business. Oh, well.
In a larger organization that's private, there is nothing wrong with hiring your own kid, either. Putting him in a position that he is completely unsuited for threatens the company, of course, and in that sense is simply stupid. It can also be argued that the company is harming the common good of the company. Private ownership doesn't mean you don't have certain moral obligations toward your employees. Good leadership is one such obligation, and putting an incompetent child in a position that harms the company is a failure of leadership.
> Can we make a distinction between parents raising their kids and giving them great opportunities, and “nepotism” where people are put in no-show jobs or are wholly incompetent?
That difference is only on paper, purely academical. In reality, almost all the time, this quickly morphs into pushing your kin into positions of power where they make a mess but you still tolerate them because supposedly they are at least somewhat predictable and you don't want to invest the time and effort to build trust with a stranger.
(Or whatever their actual motivation is -- to me it remains mostly a mystery.)
Here's an interesting extract:
> We find evidence of nepotism for 5–6.6% of scholars’ sons in Protestant and for 29.4% in Catholic universities and academies. Catholic institutions relied more heavily on intra-family human capital transfers. We show that these differences partly explain the divergent path of Catholic and Protestant universities after the Reformation.
This relates to an important paper providing evidence that indeed Protestantism was associated with scientific progress: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4389708
"Protestants also tried to impose their own bigotry but lacked sufficient coordination and authority. Had they been more effective, modern science and sustained economic growth might have never taken off."
That's an interesting take. It seems to have a continental Europe perspective. In the first 150 years of the American colonies, Catholicism was illegal, except for Pennsylvania. However, even there, Catholics remained disenfranchised. The first Catholic university in the US, Georgetown, opened in 1789. (Harvard: 1636, Yale: 1701). The first amendment was ratified in 1791 (meaning Catholicism could no longer be made illegal). Catholics were mostly unwelcome to attend other schools, that was the reason for divergence and almost certainly assured a high nepotism rate. Also note that in the 1700's/1800's nepotism in government was considered normal.
i’d be more interested in jewish numbers than protestant or catholic
Judaism like Protestantism promotes education and reading for all. Plus Judaism promotes some form of debate.
Jews are the most clannish people I have ever met and the most prone to shameless nepotism (speaking as Jew).
I'm not sure how the above relates to the argument.
sure… only because you haven’t experienced the inner circles of other religions (speaking as another relgion than Jewish)
Lol I guess you haven't met Mormons?
Agree. Hollywood and Wallstreet are great examples. Also the founders of Google and Facebook. It's no coincidence. Though I'm not sure this is nepotism as much as it is organized clan behavior.
I think Indians are even more so but there it's about caste and not just being Indian.
Humans are weird.
I can't speak for all South Asian Americans, but in my experience caste is not a significant player in our community in the US at least.
Alternatives like University Affiliation, Regional ties, Ethnic ties, Clan ties, and Workplace affiliation play a greater role due to the nature of South Asian immigration in the US (tends to be white collar professionals across all ethnic groups).
Treating South Asian Americans homogeneously will lead to the same mistakes like treating all Latinos homogeneously - plenty of South Asian heavy battleground counties like Loudoun County, Middlesex County, Williamson County, Kern County, San Joaquin County, etc have seen Ds margins drop significantly in the current election.
That said, we are a clannish bunch, and biradari (and every other South Asian language's equivalent of that word) is our guanxi.
Jewish communities are more tightly knit, and the families in these communities more interwoven with one another than the average Protestant would be to their own.
My intuition would be that nepotism would be more rife with this kind of community makeup, if you know your distant family and your family friends very well they're much more likely to try to help you out.
What does that have to do with nepotism?
> Judaism like Protestantism
Judaism is nothing like protestantism or even catholicism. If it were, we wouldn't have protestantism or catholicism. Judaism ( by that I mean real judaism ) is racial/ethnic and centered around bloodlines while protestantism is universal.
> promotes education and reading for all.
No. Judaism promotes the study of torah/tanakh and even that is only within their own people. Judaism most certainly does not promote education in the general sense and not to the general public. That modern jews in the west pursue education is not due to judaism but to european culture.
> Plus Judaism promotes some form of debate.
In a superficial manner. Like how protestants and catholics debate. Certainly not in the socratic way of the greeks.
Judaism didn't go around the world spreading literacy like Catholicism and especially Protestantism did. After all the jewish god is only for the jews while the christian god is for all humanity.
> In a superficial manner. Like how protestants and catholics debate. Certainly not in the socratic way of the greeks.
Isn't it basically a meme now that when you ask a rabbi a question you get a question in return? I think that's a cultural difference.
"examined the contribution of inherited human capital versus nepotism to occupational persistence."
Quite an interesting article. I sort of agree with its conclusions, but I don't think the methodology actually works. They are measuring something, but that thing isn't an isolated measure of nepotism.
I suspect it's mire a measure of inflow, of new blood.
Those phenomenon are not distinct. There is no hard line between occupational persistence, nepotism and human capital inheritance.
In particular (from a very quick glance!) it looks like they distinguish between nepotism and inherited human capital only by using a particular model. They have data on father-son pairs and the correlation between them in terms of publication record; and data on total number of publications of (a) academics' sons and (b) outsiders. They impose a model with just nepotism and inherited human capital and fit it to the data. I'd worry there might be other explanations for the observed patterns.
nepotism is a natural mammalian instinct, it propels us to take care of our children
but it has a negative implicit meaning because institutional power should somehow transcend lowly animal instincts (or something like that)
It's individualism vs collectivism (if I got my terms right), with one side being "got mine, fuck you", whereas the other says that we're better together.
Take wealth distribution, on the one side we have the super and hyper-rich who live like kings, on the other we have the working poor who are one paycheck or bill away from bankruptcy and/or homelessness. Kings and serfs.
There were different kinds of kings though - before a certain point in the history of most countries kings had to actively fight and wage war to achieve and maintain their positions. Over time this became more of a position where the king would deserve their positions simply by having ancestors who were "stupendous badasses" but otherwise actually had to do very little.
Early medieval kings - like those of the Franks, the Visigoths or the Nordic people - were more often than not elected for life.
Arguably the distinction between royalty, nobility and commonfolk grew larger the longer the feudal system was in place, to the point where kings inherited entire countries by birthright at the end of the XVIII century.
In practice, even later English kings were effectively elected and could have their terms ended early. Taking a few Plantagenet examples, the nobles imprisoned Edward II as retaliation for the plots of Hugh Despenser, and then the king died mysteriously (adverb used ironically). Edward III was far more popular with the nobles due to his many victories in Scotland and France. His successor, Richard II, tried to make a lasting peace with France, but that was much less popular with the most powerful burghers and nobles. So Richard II was deposed, imprisoned, and died mysteriously. No doubt if they had security cameras in those days, they would have mysteriously ceased functioning at some critical moment. So ended the Plantagenets and began the line of Lancastrian kings.
I would push back slightly and say that this trend is more even and there is less disruption to it than sometimes historians try to present. E.g. the execution of Charles I during the English Civil War of the 17th century is often presented as a sharp break with tradition, but if one accepts that dissatisfactory kings usually wind up murdered via artful legalism combined with some negligent-jailor theater, it just looks like business as usual.
It probably didn't help Edward II that he had Robert the Bruce in Scotland to fight who was most certainly an actual stupendous badass but even he was employed on condition that:
"if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us as our King"
> otherwise actually had to do very little
The risk of being overthrown was always there. They had to maintain their power through some combination of force, propaganda, and actual good rulership.
> the super and hyper-rich who live like kings,
Including having lots of offsprings. Apparently, "not procreating to save the planet" is for the poor.
Why does the opinion of any ‘side’ outweigh the opinions of any other ‘side’, beyond the ballot box?
Seems more sensible to just assume they all negate each other out in the long run, unless proven otherwise by voting records.
Politics is tricky because non wealthy very much support the wealthy politically. Agree or disagree it’s just reality in modern politics.
As for why we shouldn’t actually care abstractly there simply aren’t that many ultra wealthy. Any subsidies given to them just cost an incredible amount relative to the number of people helped etc. They also don’t directly matter in terms of broad metrics like human health, lifespan, happiness etc.
How does this relate to my comment? Did you intend to reply to the other comment?
You brought up politics in relation to different economic class.
My point was how we treat ultra wealthy as a political issue is independent from the underlying reality. They aren’t directly outvoting poor people to revive more benefits, it’s instead a question of influence.
Billionaires tend to see positive ROI from getting involved in politics, which is self reinforcing over time. But, stepping back you can judge such systems not in terms of current politics parties operate, but in the broader context of how efficient systems are. In that context the ROI is negative for society even if it can be positive for some individuals that comes at significant cost.
Huh? A ‘side’ doesn’t imply an ‘economic class’?
Many millions of people can genuinely believe in something, be on a ‘side’, while being spread across the entire economic spectrum.
At best it can be said to be an ideological differentiation, not an economic differentiation.
> A ‘side’ doesn’t imply an ‘economic class’?
It does when the side described was the edges of a distribution.
> wealth distribution, on the one side we have the super and hyper-rich
Replace a few words and:
> height distribution, on the one side we have the tall and hyper-tall
PS: To be clear the political interests of a group exist even if the group doesn’t map to a specified political party or ideology. Groups have specific interests independent of which other stances they take. We don’t think of short people in political terms, but there would be a real outrage if gas stations put their credit card readers 7 feet off the ground.
HN users can write anything they want, but that doesn’t automatically imply what they wrote is credible or must be assumed to be true for all subsequent replies…
Hence why I wrote ‘side’ in quotation marks, because I didn’t fully agree with the original parent comment’s characterization.
e.g. HN user 1 can say X part of the population is on the ‘side’ of the moon being made of blue cheese and Y part is on the ‘side’ of the moon being made of cheddar cheese. But future replies by HN user 2 and user 3 are free to treat that as all meaningless gibberish.
If you disagree with what someone posted then add a counter argument don’t just pretend it didn’t exist.
It avoids this kind of pointless replies.
To me, nepotism is a classic principal-agent problem.
Imagine you own a business, but you hire me to manage it.
If I negotiate a great salary and use it to get my kids the best education, help them get a house, fund them through unpaid internships? Not nepotism.
If you, the owner, say you want your dumb kid paid six figures for a do-nothing job? Eh, it's your money.
But if I want my dumb kid paid six figures of your money? So I decide we need a senior executive social media manager to look after our twitter account, or something? Probably you're not going to like me ripping you off.
Yes, plus sometimes the "owner" is a group of people. Then it gets more difficult for them to coordinate against the agent.
If you take six figures out of my money, I have a strong incentive to find out. If you take six figures from a treasure chest that belongs to million people, most of them will decide it is not worth their time to investigate.
>nepotism is a natural mammalian instinct, it propels us to take care of our children
Plenty of primates and human groups have shared child rearing in a non-familial way. Tribes were not aligned exclusively on family lines, and "it takes a village" was a literal statement.
Humans have an instinct to take care of babies, not just our own progeny. Our pets literally evolved to take advantage of that. A cat is not at all your genetic family member, and yet will still trigger child rearing instincts in tons of people.
This idea that we are only programmed to take care of direct genetic relatives is incorrect and a societal choice, not a scientific one.
Nepotism is mostly a scaling problem. If you have a decent family and aren't an idiot about it - then for smaller stakes, and over shorter time-spans, nepotism usually works extremely well. And there is precious little damage to society, if Chuck hires his son Sam to drive one of his Chilly Chuck's Ice Cream Trucks for the summer.
But scale up enough, and nepotism looks both idiotic and evil. The "overhead" of finding, vetting, and orienting new talent - not meaningfully related to you - is relatively fixed. Vs. the chance that Albert Einstein's son is also a Nobel-level physicist is pretty damn low.
[Added] The top end of the nepotism disaster scale, of course, is having hereditary government leadership. So when "noble blood" yet again proves itself piss-poor, the go-to ways to replace the ruler are often murder, mayhem, and/or war.
> the gap in science that emerged during the Counter-Reformation was enormous, lasted centuries
Was it now? I'd say France in the 1800s did a pretty good job about all the science stuff, and until Germany took the lead towards the end of that century (I'd say ~1880s) they were way above everyone else when it came to scientific discovery, way above the Brits, that's for sure.
If by "Catholic" the authors of the study basically mean Italy and Spain (which would be a very reductionist take, but suppose that they do that) then the decline in scientific thought starting with the 1600s has lots of other potential (mostly economics- and demographics-based) causes, not religion itself. Reminder that Giordano Bruno, who came from a Catholic country, had no opening at the very protestant Oxford, to quote wikipedia [1]:
> He also lectured at Oxford, and unsuccessfully sought a teaching position there. His views were controversial, notably with John Underhill, Rector of Lincoln College and subsequently bishop of Oxford, and George Abbot, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury. Abbot mocked Bruno for supporting "the opinion of Copernicus that the earth did go round, and the heavens did stand still; whereas in truth it was his own head which rather did run round, and his brains did not stand still",[33] and found Bruno had both plagiarized and misrepresented Ficino's work, leading Bruno to return to the continent.
Ah, I had also forgotten that Copernicus himself had been a Catholic canon.
So all this study is just, to put it plainly, absolute bs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno
Later edit: And talking about Catholic Spain, some of the most respected economists in the history of the dismal science were actually Catholic Scholastics, Schumpeter himself had almost only words of praise for the School of Salamanca guys that had written about economics, and in many cases he (Schumpeter) was trying to explain how the Spanish Scholastics had actually been ahead of their times in many domains of economics.
Germany anyway is a special case, because at this time it was quite heterodox. And even in protestant countries like Prussia, you could have a positive effect from Catholic countries surrounding like Poland. Also the quoted articles don't really support the position.
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In the age of unlimited free flow of information, it is quite ridiculous that academic institutions still exist - unless their purpose is something else than studies. Education as privilege laundering has pretty much played out its part, since degrees are much more accessible to the lower born classes who were never supposed to have access to the same easy and well paying careers as the rich.
Their purpose is also research. For many, that's their primary purpose.
Try setting an toddler in front of an iPad and see how well the toddler learns how to read academic papers and the limitations of unlimited free flow of information would become quite evident.* While there have always been autodidacts, education is still a needed role to delegate for most, especially those who aren't privileged to have parents who already possess both an education and the time to personally propagate it.
*(Actually you probably shouldn't.)
You're trying your darnedest to not understand what I'm saying. Maybe you learned that in academia?
You can instantly distribute any academic books and papers online and you can live broadcast lectures, even have two way communication between lecturer and student in text, voice or video, no matter where they are on the globe.
So the idea is outdated that you should have to invest this amount of money or these many years of your youth and be in a specific place for a degree. It has been mostly an excuse for the rich to hire the children of other rich people for well paying jobs. "Oh, you don't have a degree. Sorry, we can't consider you". Now that everybody is getting degrees, that excuse doesn't work anymore.
While vocational training is vital, a good education is so much more than that.